(Editors Note: This exchange of ideas shows the complexity of race
and gender politics in the USA. In it Black activists discuss reproductive
politics and the role of Black women in social transformation.)

BIRTH
CONTROL PILLS AND BLACK CHILDREN:
a statement by the Black Unity Party (Peekskill, NY)

The
Brothers are calling on the Sisters not to take the pill. It
is this system's method of exterminating black people here and abroad.
To take the pill means that we are contributing to our own GENOCIDE.

However,
in not taking the pill, we must have a new sense of value. When we
produce children, we are aiding the REVOLUTION in the form of NATION
building. Our children must have pride in their history, in
their heritage, in their beauty. Our children must not be brainwashed
as we were.

PROCREATION
is beautiful, especially if we are devoted to the Revolution which
means that our value system be altered to include the Revolution
as responsibility. A good deal of the Supremacist (White) efforts
to sterilize the word's (Non-whites) out of existence is turning toward
the black people of America. New trends in Race Control have
led the architects of GENOCIDE to believe that Sterilization projects
aimed at the black man in the United States can cure American internal
troubles.

Under
the cover of an alleged campaign to "alleviate poverty",
white supremacist Americans and their dupes are pushing an all-out
drive to put rigid birth control measures into every black home. No
such drive exists within the White American world. In some cities,
Peekskill, Harlem, Mississippi and Alabama, welfare boards are doing
their best to force black women receiving aid to submit to Sterilization.
This disguised attack on black future generations is rapidly
picking up popularity among determined genocidal engineers. This
country is prepared to exterminate people by the pill or by the bomb;
therefore, we must draw strength from ourselves.

You see
why there is a Family Planning Office in the Black Community of Peekskill.

A RESPONSE
by black sisters

September 11, 1968

Dear Brothers:

Poor black
sisters decide for themselves whether to have a baby or not to have
a baby. If we take the pills or practice birth control in other
ways, it because of poor black men.

Now, here's
how it is. Poor black men won't support their families, won't
stick by their women -- all they think about is the street, dope and
liquor, women, a piece of ass, and their cars. That's all that
counts. Poor black women would be fools to sit up in the house
with a whole lot of children and eventually go crazy, sick, heartbroken,
no place to go, no sign of affection -- nothing. Middle-class
white men have always done this to their women -- only more sophisticated-like.

So when
whitey put out the pill and poor black sisters spread the word, we
saw how simple it was not to be a fool for men any more (politically
we would say that men could no longer exploit us sexually or for
money and leave the babies with us to bring up). That was the first
step in our waking up!

Black
women have always been told by black men that we were black, ugly,
evil, bitches and whores -- in other words, we were the real niggers
in this society -- oppressed by whites, male and female, and the
black man, too.

Now a
lot of the black brothers are into a new bag. Black women are
being asked by militant black brothers not to practice birth control
because it is a form of whitey committing genocide on black people.
Well, true enough, but it takes two to practice genocide and
black women are able to decide for themselves, just like poor people
all over the world, whether they will submit to genocide. For
us, birth control is freedom to fight genocide of black women and
children.

Like the
Vietnamese have decided to fight genocide, the South American poor
are beginning to fight back, and the African poor will fight back,
too. Poor black women in the U.S. have to fight back out of
our own experience of oppression. Having too many babies stops
us from supporting our children, teaching them the truth or stopping
the brainwashing as you say, and fighting black men who still want
to use and exploit us.

But we
don't think you are going to understand us because you are a bunch
of little middle class people and we are poor black women, The
middle class never understands the poor because they always need to
use them as you want to use poor black women's children to gain power
for yourself. You'll run the black community with your kind
of black power -- you on top!

It is
time to speak to the whole question of the position of poor black
women in this society and in this historical period of revolution
and counterrevolution. We have the foregoing analysis of their
own perspective and it offers all of us some very concrete points.

First,
that the class hierarchy as seen from the poor black woman's position
is one of white male in power, followed by the white female, and
then the black male and lastly the black female.

Historically,
the myth in the black world is that there are only two free people
in the United States, the white man and the black woman. The
myth was established by the black man in the long period of his frustration
when he longed to be free to have the material and social advantages
of his oppressor, the white man. On examination of the myth,
this so-called freedom was based on the sexual prerogatives taken
by the white man on the black female. It was fantasized by
the black man that she enjoyed it.

The black
woman was needed and valued by the white female as a domestic. The
black female diluted much of the actual oppression of the white female
by the white male. With the help of the black woman, the white
woman had free time from mother and housewife responsibilities and
could escape her domestic prison overseer by the white male.

The poor
black woman still occupies the position of a domestic in this society,
rising no higher than public welfare, when the frustrated male deserts
her and the children. (Public welfare was instituted primarily
for poor whites during the depression of the thirties to stave off
their rising revolutionary violence. It was considered as a
temporary stop-gap only.)

The poor
black male deserted the poor black female and fled to the cities
where he made his living by his wits -- hustling. The black male did
not question the kind of society he lived in other than on the basis
of racism: "The white man won't let me up 'cause I'm black!" Other rationalizations included blaming the black woman, which
has been a much described phenomenon. The black man wanted
to take the master's place and all that went with it.

Simultaneously,
the poor black woman did not question the social and economic system. She saw her main problem as described in the accompanying article
-- social, economic and psychological oppression by the black man.
But awareness in this case has moved to a second phase and exposes
an important fact in the whole process of oppression. It takes
two to oppress, a proper dialectical perspective to examine at this
point in our movement.

An examination
of the process of oppression in any or all of its forms shows simply
that at least two parties are involved. The need for the white
man, particularly, to oppress others reveals his own anxiety and inadequacy
about his own maleness and humanity. Many black male writers
have eloquently analyzed this social and psychological fact.

Generally
a feeling of inadequacy can be traced to all those who desperately
need power and authority over others throughout history.

In other
words, one's concept of oneself becomes based on one's class or power
position in a hierarchy. Any endangering of this power position
brings on a state of madness and irrationality within the individual
which exposes the basic fear and insecurity beneath -- politically
speaking, the imperialists are paper tigers.

But the
oppressor must have the cooperation of the oppressed, of those he
must feel better than. The oppressed and the damned are placed
in an inferior position by force of arms, physical strength, and later,
by threats of such force. But the long-time maintenance of power
over others is secured by psychological manipulation and seduction.
The oppressed must begin to believe in the divine right and
position of kings, the inherent right of an elite to rule, the supremacy
of a class or an ethnic group, the power of such condensed wealth
as money and private property to give to its owners high social status.
So a gigantic and complex myth has been woven by those who have
power in this society of the inevitability of classes and the superiority
and inferiority of certain groups. The oppressed begin to believe
in their own inferiority and are left in their lifetime with two general
choices: to identify with the oppressor (imitate him) or to rebel
against him. Rebellion does not take place as long as the oppressed
are certain of their inferiority and the innate superiority of the
powerful, in essence a neurotic illusion. The oppressed appear
to be in love with their chains.

In a capitalist
society, all power to rule is imagined in male symbols and, in fact,
all power in a capitalist society is in male hands.

Capitalism
is a male supremacist society. Western religious gods are all
male. The city, basis of 'civilization', is male as opposed
to the country which is female. The city is a revolt against
earlier female principles of nature and man's dependence on them.
All domestic and international political and economic decisions
are made by men and enforced by males and their symbolic extension
- guns. Women have become the largest oppressed group in a
dominant, male, aggressive, capitalist culture. The next
largest oppressed group is the product of their wombs, the children,
who are ever pressed into service and labor for the maintenance
of a male-dominated class society.

If it
is granted that it takes two to oppress, those who neurotically need
to oppress and those who neurotically need to be oppressed, then
what happens when the female in a capitalist society awakens to the
reality? She can either identify with the male and opportunistically
imitate him, appearing to share his power and giving him the surplus
product of her body, the child, to use and exploit. Or she
can rebel and remove the children from exploitative and oppressive
male authority.

Rebellion
by poor black women, the bottom of a class hierarchy heretofore not
discussed, places the question of what kind of society will the poor
black woman demand and struggle for. Already she demands the
right to have birth control, like middle class black and white women.
She is aware that it takes two to oppress and that she and other
poor people no longer are submitting to oppression, in this case genocide.
She allies herself with the have-nots in the wider world and
their revolutionary struggles. She has been forced by historical
conditions to withdraw the children from male dominance and to educate
and support them herself.

In this
very process, male authority and exploitation are seriously weakened. Further, she realizes that the children will be used as all
poor children have been used throughout history -- as poorly paid
mercenaries fighting to keep or put an elite group in power. Through
these steps in the accompanying analytic article, she has begun to
question aggressive male domination and the class society which enforces
it, capitalism. This question, in time, will be posed to the
entire black movement in this country.

This
document was obtained by the Herstory Project from the Women's Studies
Resources | Duke Special Collections Library-A project of The Digital
Scriptorium, Special Collections Library, Duke University.http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm
. Please contact this collection for information about reproducing
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